Because of the anti-slavery activities of some of Bowdoin's graduates and faculty, the College has a substantial number of works on slavery. Most, but not all, are from the abolitionist's perspective and deal with slavery in the United States. Examples are: the three-volume Cabinet of Freedom, the journal The Non-Slaveholder, and pamphlets by such notables as, among them Angelina Grimké, Horace Mann, William Lloyd Garrison, and Gerrit Smith.

Also among these holdings is a complete run of the abolitionist newspaper Advocate of Freedom, which later became the Liberty Standard and Free Soil Republican, 1838-1849, published in Brunswick, Hallowell, and Augusta, Maine, and edited for several years by Bowdoin Professor William Smyth.

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This collection contains approximately two hundred pamphlets relating to the slavery question, written from both the anti- and pro-slavery perspectives. They are mostly American; are religious, political, and secular; and are dated between 1783 and 1916 (the bulk dates 1830-1865). Besides the works by Angelina Grimké, Horace Mann, William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, Charles Sumner, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, and others, there are also single issues or short runs of journals, reports, and proceedings of various anti-slavery or colonization societies, and arguments from legal cases such as the Dred Scott case.

Many editions and variations of Uncle Tom's Cabin are included, as well as first editions of her other works, a total of nearly one hundred. Stowe lived in Brunswick, Maine, while writing Uncle Tom's Cabin. Her husband was Calvin Ellis Stowe (Bowd. 1824), then a member of the Bowdoin faculty. Manuscript material relating to both Harriet and her husband, Calvin Stowe will be found in the Stowe Collection (M172).